Fox News have called for a boycott of Ethel Cain over her “terrorist” and “depraved” comments about the murder of CEOs.
Earlier this month, the musician shared her thoughts on the high-profile murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson after he was shot dead outside a Manhattan hotel in December. The killing led to a manhunt that lasted several days, with police eventually arresting Luigi Mangione, who was found carrying a three-page manifesto in which he criticised the American healthcare system.
On January 10, Cain expressed similar frustration with the system and said that while she wasn’t being “reactionary”, violence was “sometimes” the answer. “It’s simple,” she wrote. “You make them fear for their lives and hit them in the only place they hurt or nothing will ever get done.” She signed off the Instagram post with the hashtag “KillMoreCEOs”.
Her comments have now become the subject of outrage on the US cable news network, with panellists on an edition of The Big Weekend Show describing her comments as “sick” and “depraved”, likening it to “terrorism” and calling on the public to “boycott” the singer (via Billboard).
“The message there is violence is the answer,” said Guy Benson on the show. “You know who used that exact same mentality, that type of language? Terrorists. That is actual terrorism, what she’s talking about here … This should be a very clear black-and-white moral issue, and it is scary to see how much support that type of sentiment has gotten.”
Cain’s original post included words from Secretary Of Labor Robert Reich which lambasted powerful collectives like the National Rifle Association, “Big Oil” and insurance companies who are able to “buy off Congress”.
“Not even trying to be reactionary or “edgy” or say this shit for shock value, I genuinely mean what I say,” Cain continued. “Corporations giggle at protesting.”
“Why would anyone ever willingly come down off their throne that they’ve spent years building off the suffering of their fellow man? Nobody is getting visited by the ghost of Christmas future, no one is having a change of heart.”
She went on to say “it” – being provoking change – was simple, “You make them fear for their lives and hit them in the only place they hurt or nothing will ever get done,” and questioned why that was a “radical” idea.
Magione dominated headlines for several weeks in late 2024, developing something of a cult following online, with his supporters either engaging more seriously with his political beliefs and positioning him as a “folk hero”, or more simply dubbing him a “hot assassin” who is “husband” material.
After his arrest, Mangione became an internet meme phenomenon, with variations of “#FreeLuigi” posted on X/Twitter over 50,000 times (per BBC News), with two documentaries about him already in the works.
Back in December, Chris Rock made a joke about Thompson’s death in his monologue. During his fourth stint as Saturday Night Live (SNL) host, he touched on the internets reaction to Mangione.
“Everybody’s fixated on how good-looking this guy looks,” he said. “If he looked like Jonah Hill, no one would care. They’d already given him the chair already.”
He continued: “But he actually killed a man, a man! A man with a family, a man with kids… I have real condolences for the Healthcare CEO…but you also gotta know, sometimes drug dealers get shot.”
Cain released her latest record ‘Perverts’ on January 8, a 90-minute drone and slowcore release that serves as a side release to her trilogy of albums that began with 2022’s ‘Preacher’s Daughter’.
